“Well, being the super of the building is all I meant. I meant that and the wood business.”
“I think you’re lying, sir,” Carella said, and the store went silent. Carella waited.
“We’re old men,” Maily said at last.
“I know that, sir.”
“We’re old men waiting to die. We came through a war together long ago, and back to New Essex together, and we went to each other’s weddings, and when we began to have kids, we went to baptisms and communions and bar mitzvahs, and we even went to the weddings of the kids and are halfway to seeing their kids grown up and married, too. We’re old men, Mr. Carella.”
“Yes, sir, I know that. I want to know about George Lasser.”
“What we go to now, Mr. Carella, is funerals. That’s what we go to now. No more weddings. Only funerals. Twenty-three of us in the beginning. The Happy Kids. And now there are three of us left, and all we go to is funerals.”
“Georgie Lasser didn’t have an enemy in the world,” Ostereich said.
“He shouldn’t have died like that,” Wye said. “Not that way.”
“Leave him be,” Maily said to Carella. “He’s dead. Let us bury him the way we buried all the others. Let him rest in peace.”
“I’m waiting, Mr. Maily,” Carella said.
Maily sighed. He glanced at Ostereich. Ostereich gave a small nod, and Maily sighed again.
“George Lasser used to run a crap game in the basement of his building,” he said.
4
Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon, and as an informer, he felt that the American aversion to rats was part of a conspiracy begun in elementary school and designed to deprive him of a profession at which he was a master. He had often thought of hiring a press agent or a public relations man to construct a more acceptable public image of himself, but he had the good sense to know the aversion was too deeply ingrained in the American spirit to be changed by a mere manipulator of images. He could not understand why people felt it was wrong to tell tales about other people. Nor could he understand why a largely law-abiding citizenry had adopted as one of its hidebound codes a precept that had originated in—and was strongly encouraged and enforced by—the underworld. He only knew that if a person saw someone doing something wrong, he was reluctant to go to the authorities with his information. And whereas Danny knew that part of his reluctance was caused by fear of reprisal, he further knew that most of the reluctance was caused by the code: Thou Shalt Not Tell.
Why not?
He enjoyed telling.
He was a gossip supreme, his ears keenly attuned to every stray piece of information that wafted his way on the unsuspecting air. His mind was a complex of compartments and cubbyholes, each storing kernels of seemingly worthless information which, when evaluated, added up to a meaningful fund of knowledge. He was an expert at sifting and sorting, collating and cataloging, all tricks he had learned as a boy when a bout with polio had caused him to be bedridden for the better part of a year. When you can’t leave the bedroom, you begin to think of ways to amuse yourself. Danny Gimp, considering his talent for amusing himself, might have become a banker and the mastermind behind an international cartel if he hadn’t been born and raised on Culver Avenue, which was not one of the city’s garden spots. Having been born on Culver Avenue, and giving the devil his due, he also might have become an international jewel thief or—what is more likely—a pimp. He became neither. He became, instead, a stool pigeon.
His real name was Danny Nelson, but no one ever called him that. Even mail addressed to Danny Gimp was delivered to him by his faithful mailman, who thought Danny was a World War I veteran who had been wounded in the Ardennes, rather than a stool pigeon. As a matter of fact, there were very few people who knew that Danny Gimp was a stool pigeon, it being a necessity in the profession to keep one’s activities quiet, lest one discover one night that several hired guns were after one, objective, homicide. Being chased by gangland torpedoes, very old-hat terminology for guns, is not entertaining even if you do not limp slightly. When you do limp, it is difficult to run very fast, so Danny decided it was best to avoid any friction between himself and either oldhat torpedoes or fashionable guns, thereby eliminating foot races through the city streets.
Danny told everybody he was a burglar.
This made him socially acceptable, and it also encouraged other assorted thieves to open their hearts to him. Every time they opened their hearts, Danny opened the voluminous filing cabinets inside his skull and began collecting information, dropping bits and pieces into place here and there, making no attempt to evaluate, sorting and filing as he went along, hoping all of it would make better sense later.
A twenty-two-year-old hood might tell Danny that he needed a new right rear tire for a late-model Oldsmobile, does Danny know a good fence? Danny does indeed know a fence—not a good one, actually; actually he has done time in at least three state prisons, so how good can he be?—and while he is asking the man about a tire for his young friend, the fence casually mentions that a fur warehouse on Tenth Street was knocked over on Tuesday night, with the night watchman taking a slug in the forehead, unfortunately killing the old man. Danny clucks sympathetically, and the next day he sees his young friend’s wife—who used to be a hooker but who has graduated to the big time since she now has a husband who can keep her in heroin—and lo and behold, the wife is swathed in what appears to be 400 yards of natural let-out ranch mink. Danny has never known the precise meaning of “let-out mink,” but he suspects that this particular mink was let out of that warehouse on Tenth Street by none other than his young friend who now needs a new right rear tire for his latemodel Oldsmobile. He reads in the newspaper the next day that the night watchman must have got off a few shots at a retreating person or thing before his untimely demise, his service revolver having been found with only two bullets in it. When Danny sees his young friend he asks him how come he needs a new right rear tire. His friend says, “I picked up a nail on the parkway.” Danny looks at his friend and wonders why he doesn’t simply go to a garage and have them repair the tire, if all he picked up in it was a nail? There is the possibility, however, that the nail has really done big damage to the wheel, making it necessary to replace it. Danny is willing to give his friend the benefit of the doubt; after all, if replacement really is necessary, he knows his friend would automatically go to a fence for the merchandise.
Fences are the best discount houses in the city. They sell anything you might need, from Westinghouse portable television sets to Smith & Wesson portable .38 revolvers, and at very good prices indeed. Even square citizens in bad neighborhoods utilize the services of a fence, so why shouldn’t a cheap hood like Danny’s young friend, in dire need of a new tire, go to a fence—even if there isn’t anything suspicious about why he happens to need a new tire?
A good stoolie never jumps to conclusions.
He collects, he sifts, he collates, he waits.
A week later Danny runs across a fellow who has just come in from Chicago where he has been for several days. The fellow is carrying a very big bundle. That night Danny sees the Chicago fellow and also his young hood friend riding around in the Oldsmobile together, the right rear tire replaced by now. The next day Danny’s young hood friend is sporting a very big bundle, and the hood’s wife is on a heroin-buying jag that will keep her stocked until China runs out of poppy flowers.
What Danny reports to the police is that he believes his young hood friend broke into the warehouse with his Chicago pal, was shot at by the night watchman, who put a hole in their right rear tire and who received a hole in his forehead in return. He further tells the police that he believes the furs were dumped in Chicago and that the two thieves only recently split the cash received for the loot.